"Red Wind' pays homage to noir vision

Dan Brekke, OF THE EXAMINER STAFF

Published 4:00 am, Friday, November 24, 1995

IN RAYMOND CHANDLER'S "Red Wind," Los Angeles seethes during a Santa Ana. The desert wind that every so often feeds a wildfire finds plenty of combustible material walking the city's streets: cops, thieves, ex-cons and wealthy real-estate men all ready to detonate.

Sunday night at 10 on Showtime, those elements combine to produce a compelling finale of the cable network's

"Red Wind" opens with Marlowe stopping by a neighborhood dive late at night - it's just too hot, too windy to sleep.

Within minutes of sitting down to a beer, Marlowe witnesses a murder and becomes the protector of a woman - named, inevitably, Lola (Kelly Lynch) - for whom the victim was searching. Lola helps Marlowe out of a scrape with the murderer. He tries to hand over the killer to a graft-hungry detective, Copernik (Dan Hedaya), but winds up on the cop's wrong side.

And that's just for starters. Soon, another body turns up. Then another. Lola turns out to be the intended victim of a blackmail scheme. She's got a husband, and he's jealous. Husband and wife have lovers; hers is dead, his is alive, both are big-time liabilities. Marlowe's job: Keep the cops at bay and himself alive long enough to demolish the blackmail scheme.

Holland's smart storytelling keeps the plot clear, though she and scriptwriter Alan Trustman throw in a few post-Chandler twists.

The costumes might be period and the cars vintage, but Holland's Los Angeles leapfrogs the narrow-tie straight-cop Joe Friday era clear into the age of Rodney King and Mark Fuhrman.

Copernik is paired with a Latino cop, Ybarra (Miguel Sandoval), his intellectual and moral superior. Copernik can't forgive him, or Marlowe, for not being white. After the cops first encounter the private eye, Copernik hisses, "What's this city coming to? A spic cop and a nig private detective."

When Copernik beats up the uncooperative Marlowe later on, we can't help seeing more than the stock scene of a film noir private eye suffering the wrath of a cop he's outsmarted. The "worst of the LAPD" tapes we've watched and listened to over the last few years give these scenes a real-life edge too keen to ignore.

This little detour from Chandler's material could lead the story into an anachronistic dead end. That it doesn't is thanks largely to Glover's work.

Casting a black actor as Marlowe subtly changes the fabric of Chandler's tale. Marlowe is always an outsider. In a world full of cops who cut corners and where the rich and powerful play the law to their advantage, he's friendless.

For Glover's Marlowe, race isn't the key to the private eye's alienation - just another layer to it.

The black Marlowe is a close cousin to the character played by Humphrey Bogart in "The Big Sleep" and Robert Mitchum in "Farewell, My Lovely." He cracks wise, he's always looking for a way to even long odds, and he's alone. That's the way it should be.&lt;